


stay away from fleeting failure

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [8]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Blood Magic, Chasind Hawke, Family Dynamics, Flashbacks, Gen, Hawke Family Feels, Pre-Game(s), Reaver Hawke, Red Hawke, unhealthy family dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 04:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: “If it comes to it, die for them,”Father had told her once.“Kill for them. Do anything if it means they survive. Blood doesn’t abandon blood, Maria.”The story of how Hawke became a Reaver. Set during Act 1.





	stay away from fleeting failure

When Maria was twelve years old, a passing-through Templar saw Bethany use a spell to make herself sugar ice during a break from fieldwork – as soon as the shouting started, she did as she was told, did what she was trained to do, what her father sat her down every night and told her resolutely, holding firmly onto her chin with one hand, looking her dead in the eyes – she threw down her scythe and scooped up her sister, throwing Bethany over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and grabbing Carver by the hand, and she ran. To this day, she doesn’t know what became of that Templar, doesn’t know how Father found Mother, doesn’t know how many died to cover their escape. She just knows that she took the twins and ran through fields and forest and river, doubling back and forth until she reached the hiding place they’d agreed on. They never go somewhere new without deciding one. The twins are still little, and Bethany hasn’t stopped crying, and Carver’s feet started bleeding an hour before they arrived, and Maria had carried him, too, one child on her back and the other on her front, holding hands over her shoulder and crying together.

Maria hadn’t cried, hadn’t spoken words of comfort, hadn’t done much of anything besides carry them, and drop them, when they reached the relative safety of the safehouse. She’d barred the windows like instructed, heated water at the hearth for healing tea in case Father or Mother arrived injured, bound Carver’s feet in bandages roughly. Even young, gentleness had been foreign to her.

 _“If it comes to it, die for them,”_ Father had told her once. _“Kill for them. Do anything if it means they survive. Blood doesn’t abandon blood, Maria.”_ Blood doesn’t abandon blood, and Maria is the eldest: it has always been her lot to carry the weight of the world to spare her siblings from it. She knows the way of the world, or she thinks she does; it seems simple. Templars are bad, the monsters beneath the bed. The reason they have to move so often, hide, run for their lives, the reason that sometimes they have to bind Bethy’s hair back and dress her as a boy, the reason that sometimes Father smears ash on his face to cover his Chasind markings. It never occurs to her as a child to blame the apostates in her family for their frequent relocations, for the fear that qualifies her entire childhood. How could it, when Father is so wise, when he does everything for them – for Mother, rather – how could it, when mother gave up everything, the privileges of nobility for this? How can she complain, when her parents love each other so much, when she loves her siblings enough that she would most absolutely die for them, or kill for them, or whatever else Father asks of her, without him needing to ask? _“All you can trust is your family, Maria. You can’t trust anyone else to keep them safe.”_ Blood doesn’t abandon blood, a fact as clear as the streak her father paints across his nose, across her nose when he has a point to make.

Mother and Father found them late into the night, a few packs between them of belongings they managed to salvage, the coin they hide in different places for when they had to run. Some things were already in the safehouse: camp food and medicines and blankets, sleeping rolls. The Hawke family has done this already more times than Maria can count, moving from Denerim to Amaranthine to Gwaren to every little rat-spit mining or farming or fishing village in between. Mother took Carver on her lap and whispered to him about what a big boy he was, how very brave, and was he good for his sister? While Father took Bethany aside, took her chin in his big warm hand. He’d washed it, clearly, before coming in, but Maria could still smell blood on him. Father always smelled of blood, and earth, and fire. She remembers it being comforting.

She remembers this, now, over a decade later, because – “Come on, Killer,” Varric cajoles. “How the hell does a Fereldan refugee learn how to fight like you do? I’ll believe that you learned to fight in the army, but the army doesn’t make people into savages quite like you.”

Varric’s suite in the Hanged Man is smoky and hot, his ragtag group gathered around the long, low table for cards and drinks and food. Hawke doesn’t like it, doesn’t like the idea of being on anybody’s tab, but he’d waved her away, said something along the lines of _“I’d do it for anyone half as interesting as you.”_ Hawke doesn’t like the idea of being interesting, almost likes it less than she likes the idea of a Marcher-born calling a Fereldan a savage, no matter how he means it. One with Chasind markings and colourings, no less. She grinds her teeth.

“I’ve wondered as much myself,” Fenris admits, and Hawke shoots him a look that might have been betrayal, on anyone else.

She traces the rim of her cider. She has a personal rule, is the thing – she doesn’t give names to her dead. Once someone is dead, they’re gone, there’s nothing left of them but the chains their memory hold on you, and saying their name just gives them more power. She doesn’t know where the belief came from, if it’s some tribal knowledge passed down on her from her Father or something she formed herself over the years of her life. Bethany and Mother don’t subscribe to it, bringing up Father and Carver whenever the opportunity presents itself, and Hawke always ends up shouting, or breaking something, or making someone cry, until she goes outside and breathes through her knees and takes care of her weapons until she can’t anymore, until she’s decent to be around again, until she can stutter out something resembling an apology, for her at least, to whoever she upset.

“When I was a child my father fed me dragon blood,” she says finally, after having thought on it for a moment, chewing over the prospect of lying. Hawke isn’t a good liar, only good at keeping her tongue and minding her own business, or else beating the nosiness out of people who press her.

Despite that, the group gathered laughs – Varric, Isabela, even Aveline chuckle at that, although Hawke doesn’t move a muscle, and Bethany blanches. It’s that reaction that stops the hysterics, she thinks. Fenris is looking at her thoughtfully, academically. The former slave has more education than just about any of them, or all of them, or all of them put together, Hawke thinks. He certainly knows more about the process than two apostate’s daughters.

“Wait, you’re serious? Killer, come on. Like the reavers of old?” Varric presses, leaning across the table, as if that will get her to open up more.

“She’s not serious,” Bethany snaps, surprising most, who’ve only ever seen her be sweet. It’s to their detriment: they see Bethany, they see Merrill, sweet girls, don’t question that there might be something deeper. That they’re weapons, by their very nature. Hawke has tried to spare Beth as much as she could, but there isn’t much to do when you work as a mercenary but kill and learn to kill and be hardened by killing. A part of her is glad for it. Bethany is grown, doesn’t deserve to be coddled forever. Her father’s ghost would smack her around the face for thinking it, even as he himself devised new training regiments to help her sister grow stronger. It was never alright unless he thought of it first.

“I don’t lie,” Hawke tells her sister, pressing her lips together firmly.

“You are lying, though, because to do that, you need to use blood magic, and Father wasn’t a maleficar,” Bethany shoots back, a furious whisper, unable to speak aloud even in the privacy of Varric’s rooms, protected by Varric’s walls and Varric’s bribe money.

“He was,” Hawke retorts, and there’s more than a few hisses or gasps, unpleasant reactions around the table. Fenris has moved his chair back from the table, as if being at the same table top as them will pass the curse of magic to him. Merrill looks interested for the first time, paying full attention. Her big eyes are looking at Hawke intensely, and she doesn’t know how she feels about it, doesn’t like being the center of attention. It’s uncomfortable, but she doesn’t hate it, for some reason. “Don’t be an idiot, Beth. How the hell does a woman Mother’s size have three children in shit conditions without a problem? You were born in a damn forest. He was never a healer, in case you forgot. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change anything.”

Bethany’s mouth has dropped open, and for once Hawke’s chatty little sister is speechless. Hawke doesn’t want to know what she’s thinking: Beth swallowed more than her fair share of Chantry bullshit, via Mother, via various lay-sisters over the years. She and Carver learned how to read out of Mother’s copy of the Chant of Light, after the herbalism manual that Hawke had learned from was left behind in one of their flights.

“When I was twelve, when that Templar saw you making sugar ice,” Hawke says, and she hates telling stories, she doesn’t have the tone for it, or the patience, every word tripping out of her mouth blunt and sharp and stilted as she thinks of what she’ll say next. “Father and Mother met up with us that night in our hiding place. Father took me outside. We didn’t come back that night.”

“I remember.” Bethany admits, her face scrunched up unattractively. It looks like she’s trying not to cry, or maybe trying not to say something self-depreciating. She always gets like that, when she remembers their childhood. Hawke hates it. “He told me it wasn’t my fault, and then took you by the arm outside, and we didn’t see you at all until morning. Mother sang Carver and I songs from the Chant until we fell asleep.”

Hawke hadn’t known that, wishes she still didn’t. “He took me outside and when we were a mile away he told me that I needed to be strong enough to defend you. That I couldn’t run every time. Had to be strong enough to fight Templars, if need be. So he did the –" she looks for the word “— ritual. Called a spirit to ask how it worked and cut his arm open, spread blood across our noses and fed me dragon blood from a flask around his neck. I passed out. Woke up. Had my first training session with a real sword instead of a practice one. Then we went home and moved again.”

There is a quiet around the table now, until Varric says quietly, “What the fuck.”

“He had no right to do that to you,” Bethany says, and she is crying now, tears spilling over her pretty brown eyes. “He made you – used blood magic – for _me_ ,” and she can’t continue because Hawke stood up, reached over the table to grab her by the chin, look her dead in the eye.

“No use in that,” she grunts, wipes the tears away brusquely. “Would have done it anyways. Blood doesn’t abandon blood.” She sits back down roughly, pushes her cider across the table. Bethany takes it and drinks it in great gulps.

Varric steeples his fingers. “Pretty fucked up,” he says, “But it makes for a decent story, at least – and that’s really why you’re such a beast on the battlefield? You drank dragon blood on the orders of a demon as a kid? Shit, Hawke.” He shakes his head, light glinting off the gold in his ears. “Nothing’s ever boring with you.”

“ _I_ think it’s attractive,” Isabela drawls, leaning back in her chair and winking at Hawke. It seems to break the sombre mood in the chamber, and most of them laugh. Aveline and Fenris are both looking at her warily, the way they always do when reminders of the magic in the Hawke family come up. Hawke doesn’t care. It’s who she is. She is the daughter of an apostate and the sister of one. It’s just how it is.

Bethany looks a little better. The drink likely helped. Isabela has draped an arm around her shoulders. Varric deals out another hand of cards. Fenris eventually moves his seat closer back to the table. Merrill leans in and asks her questions, that Hawke often can’t answer but with grunts or nods or shakes of her head, but she doesn’t let that dissuade her, or distract her from winning more than half of the rounds. And to think everyone thinks her naïve, and bad at cards. Hawke knows when she’s being hustled.

After a few games, she folds, and sits, and watches the people in the room, sipping her drink slowly. If need be, she could reach into that part of herself that the spirit and blood unlocked, have all of them wailing from pain just by being near her, reach out and rip someone’s very life energy out of their throat with her teeth.

Instead, she drinks, and looks over Merrill’s shoulder and points at cards she ought to play, and at the end of the night she says her brusque goodbyes and carries Bethany home.

She spoke too much, tonight. Her skin itches from it. Hawke wishes she could be unknowable. Even to her so-called friends. Especially to them, maybe. She wasn’t built to be vulnerable, to show her soft undersides.

(There is nothing soft about her any longer, nothing but her sister and her mother and sometimes her uncle. Everything gentle she excised under her father’s stern, approving gaze.)

**Author's Note:**

> i love malcolm hawke in all his fucked-up glory. good intentions and loving your wife dont stop you from fucking up your kids, malc!!
> 
> a similar fic premise can be found here, although that malcolm is a bit harsher than mine, and that hawke far more anti-mage than maria: http://archiveofourown.org/works/7458925.


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